IPO-Bound Box Bolsters Board With Cisco CTO

Facing fierce competition from a number of tech giants ahead of a planned IPO, online file-sharing and storage company Box Inc. has bolstered its board with a top executive from Cisco Systems, Inc.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, becomes Box’s ninth director. She is the only board member who is currently an executive at another company—the others are either at Box or venture capitalists, though some of them are seasoned executives, such as Dana Evan, the founding chief financial officer of Verisign Inc., and Gary Reiner, a former General Electric information chief.

Warrior also is the second female director at Box, joining Evan, who is now a venture partner at Jafco Ventures. Silicon Valley companies have come under fire for having too few women on their boards—a study in December by Fenwick & West LLP reported that just 9.1% of directors are women at tech companies, compared with 19.9% at S&P 500 companies.

Neither Facebook, the biggest IPO of 2012, nor Twitter, the biggest tech IPO of 2013, had women on their boards at the time of their offerings. Facebook has since added two women, and Twitter, one.

Warrior joined Cisco in 2007 after serving as Motorola, Inc technology chief.

In January, The Journal reported that Box had filed for an IPO confidentially amid intensifying competition in the online storage market. The company had raised $100 million in venture-capital funding in December at a valuation of about $2 billion.